Tuesday, 10 April 2012

T-shirt dresses...

T-shirt dresses are very easy to make. You need a t-shirt and two rectangles of non-stretch fabric; one for the front and one for the back.

Sew the rectangles together.

Gather the top.

Cut the t-shirt to the desired length.

Attach the gathered skirt to the t-shirt.

Hem the bottom.

You can, of course, make lots of variations to the basic dress.

For the t-shirt dress above, I've used the Cupcake Dress pattern, from the book Make It Perfect, by Toni Coward. It's a great little pattern, with step by step instructions and most importantly for me, gives the measurements for sizes 0 - 5. This is the second time I've used this pattern. Here's a link to the first Cupcake Dress I made last year soon after I began blogging. I like the ratio of fabric sizes used in the pattern, but you could mix and match with any number of fabrics. I've used fabric from my stash and a t-shirt I bought on sale quite some time ago.

The pink t-shirt dress is made from a pre- loved, but still in good condition, t-shirt. The floral fabric is left over from a quilt my Mum made many years ago. Even though the floral pink is unused, it was just a tad see through when held up to the light, so I've lined it with a pink quilting cotton.

To finish the dress off, I've added a ruffle. Ruffles are a good way to make a dress pretty. There's various ways of doing ruffles, but I sew two rows of basting where I want the gathers. Basting is long stitches that are later removed. They can be machine or hand sewn, but in this case I set my machine to the longest straight stitch to baste.

Sew the two rows of stitching about 1/8" apart.

Don't backstitch and leave the threads hanging.

Pull either the top or bottom stitches and even out the gathers

Machine sew the ruffle to the dress by sewing in between the two basting rows.

Remove basting stitches

This is an overview of making a ruffle. Next time I make one, I'll try to remember to take photos.

I'm quite happy with how I do my gathering, but I'm curious about gathering and ruffling feet for my machine. If they produce the desired results and save time, I'll invest the money and buy one or both. I'm unsure how they produce gathering that is the exact length you want it to be. By hand gathering, I have complete control over the gathers. Can you do this with a gathering or a ruffling foot? I'd love to hear from anyone who uses these attachments.

I started a third t-shirt dress, but unfortunately didn't finish. The t-shirt was smaller than the two above and when sewing, I caught some of the t-shirt, that I shouldn't have, in the seam to join it to the dress. No problem I thought. Just unpick it and start again. Not so!!!

I hadn't bothered with a ball point needle just for sewing one seam, when one half was non-stretch anyway. Consequently, there were little and some not so little, holes where the needle had cut the fabric. There were too many holes to hide with an embellishment such as a fabric flower and the t-shirt will be too short if I cut the holes off. Lesson learned: use a ball point needle for sewing with stretch fabric!